With repairs underway to one of the only existing connections linking the Jackson Ward area across Interstate 64-95, a larger effort is being rolled out to further reconnect the neighborhood that the highway cut in half.
The City of Richmond and other agencies recently began outreach to develop a community plan for the historically black neighborhood. That coincides with the related “Reconnect Jackson Ward” study that’s weighing options for improving connections across the highway, which divided the neighborhood once known as Black Wall Street and the Harlem of the South when it was built in the 1950s.
Today, the only connections across the interstate east of the Belvidere Street interchange are bridge crossings at First Street, Fifth Street and Chamberlayne Parkway. The most central of those crossings, the First Street bridge, is for now less crossable due to an ongoing rehab of the structure that will increase its vertical clearance to reduce bridge strikes from tractor-trailers passing underneath.